


Lucid

by Yooms (Yummistuck)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Humanstuck, M/M, Roommates, Sexual Content, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-09-26
Updated: 2012-10-03
Packaged: 2017-11-15 01:49:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/521848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yummistuck/pseuds/Yooms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you wake up again, tangled in Dave’s arms as daylight peeps through the blinds, you can’t remember what you had dreamed about.</p><p>Humanstuck fic with Karkat and Dave, two lovers who live together in an apartment near the local college. Rated mature for one of the chapters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

You wake up with a start.

Your eyes snap open and you sit up. Cool air attacks your sweat-drenched back, the same cool air that your lungs are rapidly attacking with irregular, stuttering breaths.

As your gaze focuses you slowly look around you. Your room is dark, so dark that you guess that the hours must have just broken the morning.

You realize that you’re shaking, violently. The air’s cool yet you feel frozen, frozen stiff with a sharp sensation gripping at your chest with a murderous pressure.

Yet your body continues shaking. You feel needles pricking at the corners of your eyes, hear an ominous rumbling reverberating from the walls around you. Your heart speeds and your breaths shorten. You clench your teeth so hard that your jaws ache, but you’re past caring—you can’t think—you can’t  _breathe_ —

“Karkat?” you hear, the voice thick with sleep and soft concern.

The shaking and rumbling stops. You look to your left and Dave’s sitting up, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. He looks at you.

“You alright?” he asks, simply.

You let out a shaky breath and open your mouth to tell him that you’re fine, but only a broken sob comes out of you before you’re clutching him, pressing your face against the pale skin of his chest as you cry weakly. You feel his arms, thin but strong, wrap around you as he nuzzles your hair, rubs circles on your back, and smothers you in kisses. You cry against him until you can’t anymore, and by then he’s still awake and comforting you.

He doesn’t ask you anything.

When you wake up again, tangled in Dave’s arms as daylight peeps through the blinds, you can’t remember what you had dreamed about.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s late. Your room is only lighted by the bright fluoresce of your laptop and the dim orange glow soft the streetlamps, their heads outside just below your window. Your fingertips are clicking at the smooth keys of your laptop, steadily writing a seven-page paper on the chemicals involved in rapid mood changes of a client you’ve been interviewing for the past few weeks. You opened the window a few hours ago to let in drafts so that warm, stuffy air won’t tempt you to drowsiness. Nevertheless, you notice that your typing is slowing and your eyelids are drooping. You’re only at the four-page mark, though, and you’re reluctant to stop.

You’re rubbing at your eyes with lazy knuckles and telling yourself that you might be able to finisht he paper in the morning when you hear a loud thump outside your door. You freeze, the cool air around you suddenly turning ice-cold along with your movements. Goosebumps burst onto your skin. You glance at the time of your laptop and relax a bit—it’s around the time Dave usually gets home. Who else can it be but him?

You slowly stand up, your very limbs creaking by being in motion after hours of stillness, and cautiously open the door. On the ground, face pressed flat against the rough carpet and shades neatly sitting on the top of his head, lies Dave.

You quickly drop to your knees, heart thumping in your throat, and your fingers fumble around the nape of his neck. You finally press your fingertips against a soft spot and feel the steady pulsing of blood beneath his skin. You release the breath you didn’t know you were holding—and then you begin to wonder what exactly made your boyfriend collapse outside your room at one in the morning.You’re about to shake his shoulder when he shifts and turns his head toward you, his visible eye dark brown in the dimness.

“What the fuck are you doing? You probably woke up everyone with your crashing,” you hiss, quietly. You and Dave have gotten plenty of complaints from querulous downstairs neighbors about the ruckus you both cause.

He doesn’t reply for a moment, his breathing slow and his eyes half-closed. “S’rry,” he finally mumbles, and you recognize the lethargy smeared over his voice like thick condiments over toast. “‘m tired.”

You frown at him, reaching  up a hand to let your fingers comb through his hair. His eyes flutter shut at this. “Did something happen?” you ask.

He moves his head a fraction of an inch to both sides. “J’st a long day. ‘m fine.”

 ”Far from it,” you snort with a quick roll of your eyes. “Alright, asshole, get your bum up and into bed if you’re so exhausted.”

“No.”

“ _No_?”

“Shower,” he mutters determinedly. You stare at him, but his eyes are still shut and he looks asleep. You groan. Ever since he’s gotten a job at a nightclub, Dave has made a point to take a shower every night after he comes back to rid the lingering fumes of smoke from his body because you absolutely detest the smell. He’d often wake you up while crawling into bed by the damp strands of his hairs, as they’d often brush against your neck and jolt you out of sleep.

“It can wait until tomorrow holy shit—I promise I won’t complain. Get your ass to bed,” you say. His eyebrows knit together by a millimeter.

“No,” he repeats.

He’s insufferable, but you love him. “Can you even stand?” you demand.

He doesn’t reply for a moment, either lost in dreamland or contemplating your question. Perhaps both. “Bath,” he finally replies, his voice more of an exhale of breath than anything.

You press your palm against your face and think. Dave will drown himself if he takes a bath in this condition, but if you don’t let him he’d anchor himself to where he is now and sleep on the cruddy carpet. You’re considering the third option when the fucking mindereader, in a small, hopeful voice, suggests, “You come with?”

Fuck. His broken English wins, and you stand up to get the bath water running. You pour in some colorful bath salts, the ones that Dave’s sister gave you because they performed aromatherapy and she believes that they can aid you in one way or another, and raise the temperature of the water to the way Dave likes it.

You return to the hallway to find that Dave has managed to get himself up into a sitting position. He’s leaning against the wall, his eyes shut closed, but he feels your footsteps and cracks an eye open. You offer him your hands and he takes them, and for a second you actually believe that he might just be able to stand up by himself but he drapes himself over you like a overgrown child and you have to half-drag him backwards into the bathroom.

He leans against a wall as you undress him, and you have a feeling that he’s actually enjoying himself so, once he’s completely naked, you dump him into the bathtub without warning. He surfaces, sputtering questions, but by then you’re undressing yourself and completely ignoring him. You lower yourself into the water with him, slick skin meeting skin and you almost lose your balance while trying not to step on a limb or two. The tub’s obviously not meant for two, so you both displace plenty of water as you shift around to get comfortable, and you inwardly curse at the sound of water splashing onto the ceramic floor. Fuck--but he leans against your torso, the back of his damp head resting against your throat, and you forget it.

Wordlessly, you reach for the pink bottle of shampoo that Dave specifically uses and pump two squirts of it onto your palm. Accustomed to this ritual, Dave scoots a few inches lower into the water so that you can begin lathering the shampoo into his hair. You watch his eyelids flutter shut as your fingers card through his hair, massaging his scalp with your fingertips and light circles, a sort of physical lullaby that he's been grown to love the past few years. He sighs when you begin scratching the edges of his scalp, and you can almost feel the waves of tension slowly leaving his tired body.

You continue your ministrations for a while, listening to Dave's breathing steadily become slower and slower as he falls deeper into a doze. The air around you is warm and humid, and the perfumed steam that rises from the surface of the bathwater is making it hard for you to focus. If you both fall asleep, you tell yourself, you'll both wake up with sore throats and then what the fuck would you do?

You break him from it by pouring water over him, using the plastic bowl you keep on the tub for just these sort of occasions. He jumps a bit, snorting water out of his nostrils, but you ignore him and slick conditioner over the ends of his hair and bangs and place your chin firmly on the top of his head. He leans back further against you and you place you arms around him, humming lightly. Dave shifts and looks up at you, his eyes tired but smiling, and you lean down to kiss him.

"Alright," you say when you pull back. "Go wash yourself off and we can get the fuck to bed."

He grins at you and dunks his head under the water, pushing himself back up violently to spray water over your relatively dry face. You stare at him, unimpressed, but he just smiles and grabs the bright yellow loofa and squirts the green body wash that you love so much onto it.

It takes you both close to forever to wash each other, by which then your hair is completely soaked and you don't think either of you will stop smelling like lime melon passionfruit for at least a week. You finally pull the plug of the bathtub and Dave, suddenly so much more awake, takes the task of drying you both and hauling both your asses to bed.

He does this by grabbing you from behind when you enter the room--that unmanly squeak did  _not_  come from you--and practically jumping into the bed.

"Fuck-- _ouch_ \--you fucking bastard, what was that for--" you begin when your body hits the mattress in every uncomfortable way possible, but your words stop and you hunch your shoulders up as you feel the tip of Dave's nose, cold from the cooling water, press against the back of your neck. He kisses your damp skin and you can feel him smile as he does it.

"Mine," he simply says, snuggling into you and pulling the covers over you both. You sigh in exasperation, but you shift so that you're facing him and press your forehead against his chest.

You fall asleep listening to his steady heartbeat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a complete liar if I say that this fic isn't also a huge opportunity to write as much fluff as I can before actually getting the plot to move along. I swear that it exists though.
> 
> As usual comments would be much appreciated! Thank you!


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